


The Physics of the Crowbar

by ArdeaWrites



Category: Half-Life
Genre: Aliens, Canon-Typical Violence, Drug Addiction, Freeman wants to live, Freeman's POV, Gen, Gordon Freeman - Freeform, Hyperawareness, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, More OSHA compliance than you'd expect, Parasites, Parasitic Aliens, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Visceral, addictive healing, black mesa, discussions of wartime morality, half-life - Freeform, if it moves, introspective, living by the crowbar code, mental lab notebooks, mute character, problems with gravity, smash it, sociopathic scientists
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-03-18
Updated: 2019-09-14
Packaged: 2019-11-23 20:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 9
Words: 16,806
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18156932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ArdeaWrites/pseuds/ArdeaWrites
Summary: A parasite sprang from the rubble and he smashed it down viciously. The crowbar pinned it to the floor, its innards leaking even as it scrabbled for escape. The thing whined and screeched and died, fighting every second. Maybe a biologist could have told him why the thing was hostile, or what mechanism drove it to seek a human host, but he was not a biologist. He was a physicist, and he'd decided to live.--Narrative of the first game.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> \- I'm writing Freeman as vocally mute but with a very active internal voice.  
> \- NPC names and info are made up, not in reference to any existing cannon lore or media.  
> \- I'm referencing this walkthrough here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vFZ7PZ0bwc because while I have played through the entire game, this story is significantly shorter and contains a lot less wandering around, getting lost and general repeated dying than my playthrough!  
> \- First game only, no spoilers for later games.  
> \- It's Half-Life. Rating is for a violent alien invasion and ensuing blood and gore. No sexual content.

He nodded acceptance and put on the suit.  
The scientist smiled and said something in the half-commanding half-condescending voice of elder academia. 

He didn't listen. The passing comments were never relevant. If someone wanted to tell him something he needed to know, they'd look him in the eye before they spoke. Everything else was useless background noise. New coworkers sometimes mistook his silence for disdain; it wasn't for them, personally, just for anything -and anyone- not relevant. 

Security guards were relevant in that they were ignorant. Ignorant of the work they guarded, ignorant of its impact on the world around them. Ignorance made them a liability. Liabilities required attention. So he knew the security guards, nodded to them as he passed through checkpoints, made eye-contact, checking _yes you're there, at your post. That is correct, now stay there and don't touch anything._ They nodded back and smiled, some addressing him by name. Most scientists didn't bother to acknowledge them. 

Most scientists didn't understand liability very well. 

He passed through the first and second checkpoints. Each segment was isolated, both physically and intellectually, from the others. Research teams worked in parallel, independent and unknowing, solving the same problem five different ways to prevent intellectual cross-contamination. No one scientist had the whole picture but Freeman knew enough to be very, very careful. 

No one tampered with physical applications of theoretical particle physics for this long without getting an itchy feeling in their fingertips, an odd and distinct sense of being watched, and a sure knowledge that _work smart, work safe_ was code for _do exactly as you're told._ And who was doing the telling? Certainly no one in Black Mesa. 

Medical units stationed in the hot labs provided emergency regeneration boosters for life-saving treatments. Warnings and disclaimers informed the user they would force tissue regrowth in record time, at the risk of death-by-cancer later in life. Freeman had never used one and never known someone who had. They were like AEDs, everywhere but useless unless something went very, very wrong. _"You get to pick, no liver or two?"_ the security guards joked about them. 

Freeman touched one as he passed, for luck. 

The crystal insertion was as routine as any reality-challenging, physics-ignoring experiment ever was. He'd done them before, many times. That was his line in the script of Black Mesa. Don the suit, insert crystal, record observations, run his own set of trials testing the boundaries of the material's physical properties. Was it replicable? Were yesterday's predictions upheld? Or was the element of maddening randomness in its response patterns going to baffle their tiny corner of academic humanity for another day? 

"They went to a lot of trouble to get it..."  
He looked up, searching for the speaker. Another white-coated scientist.  
"...Want an especially good look at this one..."  
"...Not rated for this..."  
"...Deviating from standard procedures..."  
The hair on his neck stood up and his palms itched. This was a new script, dangerous, inaccurate, too many variables. Who was writing it? 

He crossed through the final checkpoint into the hot lab, passing from the realm of man to the realm of radiation. The realm of this-will-kill-you-painfully. His suit protected him from most hazardous materials and was tough enough to withstand the daily physical wear without compromising integrity. It would probably have quite the military application if it weren't so prohibitively expensive. More than once, someone had joked he didn't need to worry about being rescued from the hot labs, the higher-ups would want that suit back at any cost. 

The startup sequence went well. The sample arrived correctly mounted. Aside from an increase in background hum and vibrations, all seemed as predicted. His mind half on the crystal and half on yesterday's notes, written firmly in ink on the triple-layered standard-issue carbon copy laboratory notebook, he wheeled the sample into the mass spec's observation core. 

Yellow-green lightning split the room. Energy spidered outward, searing bolts connecting the crystal to every conductive surface. 

He landed face-down behind the spec shielding matrix. His teeth ached with bone-deep vibrations and he saw only hazy after-images of the energy discharge. He heard the crackle of electricity and rolled away as a bolt walked its way across the plating he'd been on. It connected to the shielding matrix and something in the machinery overloaded and burned. 

The suit's heavy rubberized insulation protected him but he didn't know for how long, or if the burning-rubber smell was coming from him or from the polymer sheathing on the chamber's failing electrical components. Black acrid smoke billowed up from the control computer, and he had his answer. Even inside the hood, his hair stood on end with static charge. In the back of his mind, buried somewhere deep in the academic training of a decade spent in laboratories, he made a mental note on his mental lab notebook:  
_Upgrade electrical wiring in mass spectrometer.  
And give the suit guys a raise. _

Clearly the over-designed, absurdly expensive suit was the only thing keeping him alive. Mostly alive. As the bolts sizzled past he watched his heart monitor jog with arrhythmia. He had minutes maybe, or less.  
An explosion, then falling, then darkness. Was his time up? No, he heard his own breathing and his heart pounding, and the pain was less. 

Pain, what pain, when had he been injured? 

The world blinked back, a different world. Dark, angry purple sky, shivering ground, a distinctly biological background vibration, like twisting cartilage. Energy built and exploded, and darkness again. Something was in the darkness. Several things. They looked back at him, lurid green eyes and tripodial forelimbs twitching in his direction. 

_I am not a biologist,_ he protested to his mental lab notebook. But he made himself think on paper, letting the liturgical process of observation stand as a filter between his senses and his sanity. 

_Gravity less than earth. Ground soft, spongy, biological in origin. Fungus mat? Autonomous life-forms five-limbed. One visible visual processor._

_Not overtly hostile._

He felt the world shift, tilt, and this time he was ready for the dragging sense of movement, part vertigo and part failed-elevator-fall. The lab came back. Or he came back to the lab. What was left of it. 

The security guard was dead, electrocuted. He’d done his job. He hadn’t touched anything he wasn’t supposed to, but he was dead anyway. The script failed him. Blood on the walls meant others were dead too, violently. Alarms blared, one for a hot-lab breach, one for mass electrical failure, one for a hazard containment lockdown and one for a medical emergency. And one for a facility-wide evacuation notice, uselessly recommending exit through now-sealed doors. 

He stopped to breathe in the relative safety of the ready-chamber and watched a life-form coalesce from a ball of yellow lightning into a holding tank. 

_What….?_

He cursed the tunnel-vision mindset of the laboratory hierarchy and thought of all the data wasted just because he was a physicist and not a biologist. Clearly someone had known the crystal could, apparently, teleport organic matter. _Tesseract? Wormhole? Definitely wormhole. A tesseract wouldn’t have produced the falling, dragging sensation. Theoretically._ It didn’t matter that he knew, because they’d _already known._ They’d been ready for alien life-forms and they’d still sent a physicist. 

And now people were dead. And more were going to die. And all he had was _maybe the ground’s a fungus._

“We warned them!”  
The white-haired scientist cowered behind a ruined diagnostics panel. “We told them a resonance cascade was possible!” 

_Told whom?_ Freeman wanted to shout. 

“Get to the surface. Go for help. Someone must know we’re trapped down here!” 

He turned away from the cowering scientist. Go for help. Sure. If the combined research and intellect of Black Mesa couldn’t close whatever door they’d just opened, who on the planet did they expect might help? He inspected the angry little organism in the holding tank. Unlike the pentapods in the darkness, this one certainly acted hostile. He wondered if there were more, and if so, what he was expected to do about it. He imagined if one shot the thing, it might die. Or smash it like a bug. Doing so would probably destroy invaluable research samples, but if it were that or getting bitten, he’d take the destruction any day. 

_I’m a physicist,_ he wrote on the mental page. Then in a fit of un-scientist-like temper he underlined it three times and circled it. _Not a biologist!_


	2. Death of a Laboratory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What would Freeman's first encounter with a parasitized coworker be like? And what would he think of the first kill?

The scientist initiated the retinal scanner but didn’t seem interested in accompanying him. He stepped through, and leapt back from the electrical arc walking its way across the control panel. The door imploded into a crumpled heap of metal and glass. The arc cut and he ran, and felt it snap back behind him in the hair on his neck. 

So much for a localized disaster. 

The hall beyond was a flickering labyrinth of overturned equipment and blood. He almost ran into an unaligned laser and watched in horrified fascination as it superheated the wet innards of a dead guard. It tracked a smoldering line of melted black polymer floor tile back across the hall. He stepped over the guard, conscious of the blood now tracking behind him, and picked up the crowbar the guard had been using on the security door.  
The cold steel felt reassuringly solid in his hands. He smashed the glass and slid through the opening, careful not to tear the suit. The elevator was just beyond. Upstairs, someone would have order. Someone would know how far the disaster had spread and what, exactly, was going on. He hit the button, heard a scream, and glimpsed the falling, flailing white-coated men- and felt the crash resonate up through the shaft. 

No one upstairs was going to help.

The ladder went up four floors, and he appreciated every moment he’d spent keeping himself in shape in some personal vendetta against the image of the weak-backed intellectual. He stepped out onto the landing and a bullet whizzed past his head.  
He dove for wall’s meager cover, but the shooter was another security guard, white-faced with panic but already aiming for another shot- not at Freeman, but at the…  
… the thing. The staggering, bulbous, clawed… thing. White coat. Pants. Shoes. 

Talons. Blood. No face. 

_Alien._ He stated it in his head, firmly, in ink. 

Then he saw the name badge. Dr. Herkimer. 

Dr. Herkimer was an annoying microbiologist of forty-five, who thought he could grow a handlebar mustache but couldn’t and was under the delusion he could play a saxophone. He was not an alien. He had not been an alien at lunch yesterday, when Freeman had overheard him regaling three poor cornered interning post-docs about the virtues of his sax single. 

The faceless head screamed.  
The security guard shot it dead. 

“What the hell…” the man voiced Freeman’s thoughts, but Freeman was three steps ahead of him.  
The small creature in the tank. Grasping claws. Extending mouth. Co-opting a victim’s nervous system through the brain and spinal cord, puppeting a body for increased mobility. Vicious claws and teeth, a crude but effective means of acquiring nutrients. 

_I am not a biologist!_ he screamed into his notebook. He did not want to understand the parasite’s traits and methods. He did not want to recognize the lab coat and clothing, or know the face under the dying alien membrane. The body beneath was dead, had been the moment the thing took hold. He could see that now from how it came half-detached, exposing bone and brain tissue.  
But there were no numbers to hide in, no theories of gravitational anomalies produced by resonance with internal crystal planes. There was only blood, bodies, and the crowbar in his hand, as a second parasitized scientist stalked down the hall. Its screaming was eerie and grating, too aggressive to be pitiful, and the claws left no space for mercy. 

Maybe killing it was a mercy to the former human underneath. 

The guard’s shots flew wide, so he slammed the crowbar’s notched end down its throat and wrenched up, dislodging the parasite enough to slow it. Then he smashed in the bulbous head.  
Oily yellow pus and red blood splattered back at him, but it went down in a wet limp heap. He stood panting over the corpse, glad of the suit’s mask and hood. The guard was watching him with the same mix of horror and relief he felt. It was one thing to kill from behind a gun, at distance, and another thing to feel the twitch and thrash of death in your own hands. 

The crowbar was warm and sticky, but he gripped it tighter.  
_I am not a killer,_ he thought, _but I will not die down here._ He nodded to the guard and set off down the hall, a fresh blank page in his mind’s eye. _Alien lifeforms hostile, parasitic. Original form small, probably vulnerable. Aggressive. Uses human host as organic tool, weapon and vehicle. Not fast. Probably not sentient. I hope._

Three more parasites between him and the tram. Three more wet, bleeding once-humans, once-coworkers. He made himself look away, not wanting to know who they’d been and if he knew them. He watched Dr. Kenmyer die at the tram platform, his screams echoing a long moment after his impact. There would be no escape that way. 

He crawled through a weakened section of wall and into his own laboratory, now thick with fumes from melted electrical components. Multi-million dollar resonance analysis equipment, gone in minutes. His coworkers dead. His own carefully triplicated stack of laboratory notes gone, lost, destroyed, irrelevant. For three long, gasping breaths he surveyed the damage. The lab was finished. Nothing could be salvaged, not from a disaster like this. The equipment was too delicate, too finely calibrated. There would be no coming back here. 

A parasite sprang from the rubble and he smashed it down viciously. The crowbar pinned it to the floor, its innards leaking even as it scrabbled for escape. The thing whined and screeched and died, fighting every second.  
_So I will fight too,_ he thought. _I am a physicist, not a dead man._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought the lab just behind the reception desk looked sufficiently complicated to be a physics lab. It's now Freeman's lab, for the purpose of this story.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Freeman enters unfamiliar territory, ponders the nature of weapons, and discovers emergency medical aid stations.

He crawled through a ventilation shaft and dropped into the empty hallway beyond. Something chittered and he raised the crowbar defensively, but the parasite had found easier prey. He watched through the glass in fascinated horror as one parasite distracted a curious scientist while another crept up behind and leapt. It settled onto the man’s head, engulfing the cranium in seconds. Barely a minute later and the man was a brainless puppet. He’d succumbed without protest, without a fight. Dead, without falling.  
  
The hall swam before him. They were intelligent, capable of working together. More than animals, they were vicious enemies. Did they see humans as the unthinking beasts, or did they know they were destroying fellow intelligent life?  
  
Something moaned behind him and he spun. In the darkened lab, a puppet twitched, groaned and stood.  
  
He slammed the crowbar down into the soft tissue again and again. The man under the alien writhed with each hit, fingers reaching for him even as the body failed and fell.  
  
He turned away, disgusted and relieved- how many had he killed now? Three? Four? One less to follow him, one less monster to worry about.  
  
Around the corner the bodies of a security guard and a parasitized scientist lay entangled on the floor, blood and fluid pooled around them. He looked away, not wanting to recognize the guard. What use were they, if they couldn’t even shoot the creatures? What use was any of this…?  
  
_No. I will not die today._ He shoved the despair down and turned back to the guard. In the gristly pile, the gun lay mostly empty. Its casing was greasy with blood but he picked it up and inspected it. Safety off, five bullets left in the clip. The crowbar was still comfortingly heavy, but now he could kill something before it came into grabbing range.  
  
He crawled through the next set of broken security doors. His own unit was now well behind him, but as long as he kept traveling _up_ he was sure to come out somewhere in the upper Black Mesa complex.  
  
Then green lightning flashed in front of him. He threw himself back, memories of the resonance cascade flooding back, but no- this small tear in reality only deposited a four-legged green-flanked bulbous many-eyed _thing_ on the floor before sputtering out.  
  
It chittered rhythmically, then sent a blast of sound and force in his direction. He dove for what cover the broken security doors offered and wasted three bullets bringing it down. The maggot-like body writhed twice and leaked green ichor.  
Maybe a biologist could tell him why everything was trying to kill him. Or maybe they’d opened a wormhole into some intergalactic battlefield. He didn’t know. He didn’t care. He’d never fired on a living target before. Somehow the sense of accomplishment with the gun was different, more mature, than with the crowbar. The crowbar was an intimate weapon, the gun impersonal and advanced.  
  
_To kill with the club of the dark ages or the bullet of modernity, which is the more human?_  
A human voice thanked him. A white-haired scientist, not one he recognized, cowered in the corner. Gore splattered the man’s wrinkled face. The scientist wrung his blue-veined hands and sobbed his thanks at the rescue.  
  
Freeman left him behind. Elder academia’s arena was the mind, the papers, the data. Clearly the cutthroat world of grants and review had not prepared this man to witness genuine violence. _I will live today, and you will die_ , he thought, and felt the thrill of exhilaration and a strain of disgust at the scientist’s weakness. Had he ever been a cowering lump of flesh, prey for the vicious beasts now prowling the corridors? Or did his decision to live, and willingness to kill, set him apart? Movement in front of him demanded answer and he raised the gun, but hesitated.  
  
A man stared back at him.  
  
A man, but not a man. Skin faintly green. Suit faintly wrong. A parody of a man, a thing in a man skin, but not a parasite puppet. Something new.  
  
Something coldly, calculatingly observant.  
  
A colleague.  
  
He sensed it deeply, the gaze on him like his own on a data stream, weighing the information, the variables, the _usefulness._  
  
And he raised the gun again, and shot the two maggot-dogs as the crashed through the glass beside him. When he looked back, the observer was gone.  
  
Deep in the bowels of the mothballed nuclear sample storage, he came across another white-coated scientist, this one less cowering and more talkative. “Take me with you,” he demanded, glasses askew. Freeman read his nametag. Mortmontry. He nodded once and turned away. Let the man follow or not, maybe he’d be useful.  
  
The man didn’t scream when he bludgeoned a puppet to death in front of him, or when he rifled through the dead for a pass card to get through a locked door. Mortmontry calmly worked the retinal scanner, miraculously undamaged, to open the door for them both. He locked it again behind them and sank to the floor. “You think that’ll keep them out?” he asked, and Freeman saw his bravado for what it was: five minutes of adrenaline and a state of near-shock.  
He didn’t answer, and wished he hadn’t read the nametag. But the room held much-needed ammunition. He offered a spare hand gun to Mortmontry but the man shook his head. “I don’t know how to shoot,” he said. “I’d just hurt myself. You better go on without me.”  
  
Two corridors down, yellow lightning splattered in mid-air. He aimed for the maggot-dog and adjusted his posture as a bipedal, monocular three-armed alien stepped through the breach. He recognized the creature from the flashes of the far world during the resonance cascade, but this one seemed different. It arched its back and electricity seared from its hands straight for his chest. His suit shrilled with alarms as he hit the floor, pain lancing through his right side from the discharge and left side from the impact. He fired up at it, missing twice before hitting the eye and head. It collapsed in a heap of limbs and claws, dark blood oozing from the shattered eye.  
  
Something rattled in a trash can. Parasites chittered from the corners. He dragged himself to a floor hatch and dropped into the waterway beneath, part of the mountain’s extensive cooling system, and caught himself wondering inanely if the aliens would follow him down here.  
  
Of course they would. They were a hostile, invading intelligent force. They didn’t look human and they almost certainly didn’t think like a human would, but clearly “kill the humans” was a concept they understood.  
They’d keep hunting him. They’d keep coming.  
  
So he splashed down the water pipe, grateful for its size, and found himself trapped.  
  
Panic ate at him, compounded by the pain in his side. He leapt for a floor grate, missed and slipped on the landing. He came down on his burned right side and gasped in pain. Cold water flooded through the charred, melted suit, soaking his clothing in seconds.  
  
_Get out. Get out!_ The panic response overrode the pain and he struggled up. The water was stale and old, but he was thirsty enough to consider drinking it. He needed more of it to reach the grate. A flow valve? An emergency floodgate? Yes, there. An auxiliary flood control, in case of coolant failure farther down the line. Of course. He wrenched the wheel, gasping with each turn. He’d never realized how much arm movement necessitated core movement.  
It worked, and the tunnel filled with water. Another deep moment of panic, the inborn fear of drowning, nearly made him miss the puppet waiting above the grate. The thing rasped out a dry, grating moan and reached for him with long clawed hands. He shot it and climbed out, nearly spent by lifting his weight from the water. He wondered if the floodgates would continue to flow, spilling out like a forgotten clogged toilet behind him.  
  
_Mind seeking distraction_ , he thought. _Signs of disassociation._  
  
He searched the halls and chamber beyond- a loading dock for transporting heavy equipment to the reactor research labs. Below him. Far below him.  
Wrong direction.  
  
But what choice did he have? Only one door, only one way forward. And forward, now, was down.  
  
The lift leaver was blocked by the body of yet another guard. He lifted the man under the armpits and hauled him back. The body was still warm, the arms limp and loose. At least the man wasn’t a puppet; he’d been spared that indignity.  
The lift moved with grating, maddening slowness. Every breath was pain, every hitching click of the lift’s cogs another jolt on the melted flesh over his right side. He looked down over the edge, trying to gauge the distance, and felt the _click click_ of pointed chitin legs on his shoulders, the obscene fleshy warmth of the parasite’s belly against his neck, and the smelled the swampy stink of its orifice opening over his face. The crowbar flashed up and into the body cavity, skewering it through, before his conscious mind caught up. Warm fluids sluiced down his head and shoulders, dripping from his elbows and pooling around his heels, a strange and eerie anointment to his will to live.  
  
Cold shivers wracked his spine but he held himself still, crowbar in hand. That was close. Too close. And where there was one, there were more.  
  
And yes, the sound of skittering feet- and the crowbar went through the thing with a satisfyingly wet crunch.  
  
An emergency medical aid box flashed from a platform near the lift and he jumped for it, landing hard and gasping. The lift slid past and stopped, its automated tones happily announcing journey complete.  
The aid station had a helpful little diagram and an auto-delivery cable that mated to his suit’s medical port. He’d never used it before and wasn’t entirely sure what the delivery mechanism was. He plugged the cable into the suit and gasped. Euphoria rolled through him and his vision hazed in bliss. Down the wall he slid, until the cable to the aid station drew taunt. It chimed completion and withdrew; its payload of nerve stimulants, narcotics and tissue-regrowth formula now swirled through his bloodstream. Rapid breathing, elevated heartrate, cold sweat, vertigo… as he cataloged the effects, he shivered in the most visceral pleasure he’d felt since some biochemist grad student spiked the punch at the physics luncheon with a favorite synthetic party stimulant.  
  
He shook sweat out of his eyes and wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his suit. No wonder the darn things were covered in warnings. The high was brief but powerful, so powerful he was reaching for the cable again before he realized the box was empty. He wondered which mad chemist had been responsible for including a synthetic opiate alongside the regrowth formula, so the pain of forced tissue regeneration was accompanied by a habit-forming pleasure. A dangerous, deadly combination- any employee injured bad enough once to need treatment would be liable to harm themselves again just for the drugs.  
  
But then, this was Black Mesa. The chemist in charge of the health packs might have just found the idea amusing, or been using the aid stations as a cover to supply themselves with narcotics for years, microdosing daily without anyone the wiser. Freeman’s pleasure was in the realms of mathematical theory as applied to predictable physical outcomes, not the biochemical response patterns of the human body, or so he told himself, firmly, again.  
  
_I am a physicist, I am above this,_ he complained to his lab notebook. _Immediate, effective, crude. Recommend removal of opiate, unnecessary except for repeated exposure_. Which was likely to be today. Forced tissue regeneration _hurt_. It used an exorbitant amount of steroids, drained the body’s caloric reserves and mostly just made stiff scar tissue over the wound without healing underlying damage. Freeman flexed his hands and stretched his shoulders. The skin stung and twinged in odd, unfamiliar places; the new flesh not yet strong enough to stand much strain. If he was hurt again, in a normal world, he would weigh the pain of the wound against the pain of forced healing. But with the boxes spiked and the high likelihood of being repeatedly zapped, stabbed, munched, splattered or irradiated… he sighed.  
  
Could he escape before his body became addicted to the pain/pleasure feedback loop, or was his choice now between lifelong addiction and death by parasitic brain-eating alien tick?  
  
He pushed himself up the wall and staggered away from the aid station. Hopefully he wouldn’t need another one. Hopefully he’d never have to see one again. He wondered what his burn looked like, and if bits of the suit’s torn lining were now embedded in speed-healed flesh. He envisioned himself at the end of his journey, crawling up through the mountain and into daylight, a monstrosity of overgrown skin and suit, an alien in his own land, and shook off the fevered image.  
  
_I will live._


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Freeman is afraid of heights. Who knew?

The walkway ahead buckled and fell, taking a half-materialized maggot with it. The thing’s sonic screams echoed eerily up from the darkness. No way forward by the usual path, but pipes went around. He climbed up into the pipe structure, praying they held his weight. They groaned but held.

He knocked out a grate and slid into the ducts, oddly pleased to be using the crowbar for its intended purpose of levering things apart. The ducts were clean and clear of aliens and blood; the odd dust bunny was a welcome change, and he wondered if he could stay in them, if he could reach the surface via HVAC system alone.

_Give the HVAC guys a raise_ , he jotted in the mental notebook. They were probably still alive, somewhere on the surface, blissfully unaware of the chaos below. Mundane tasks like maintenance and cleaning were taken care of by an off-site crew, on certain days, supervised of course but by personnel the base considered ironically unimportant and expendable. By Black Mesa’s previous standard, that had meant meager pay, terrible hours and a rotating roster of temps, but by today’s standards that meant _not important enough to be dead yet._

The duct didn’t go far enough.

He dropped out in an unfamiliar part of the coolant recycling system, where murky contaminated water moved sluggishly through enormous storm drains. Service platforms provided access, but rarely; and the cavernous place was crawling with life-forms.

They’d been here a while. No way the colonies of ceiling-clinging barnacles or the herds of parasites had spawned in the scant hour since this horror began; no, today was not the first breach in the walls of reality, nor the first to escape containment. It was just the biggest to date, the one impossible to ignore.

A door across the canal looked hopeful. Too far below to jump to solid ground, he opted for a hesitant leap into the water. His damaged suit let more cold moisture in and he didn’t want to think about the possibility of infectious bacteria or radioactive particles. Who knew what labs upstream dumped their liquid waste into the system.

He slaughtered his way through the parasites on the service ledge and bludgeoned a maggot-dog to death to reach the door, and found it locked. Its heavy steel frame defeated the crowbar’s attempts at opening. Apparently he was on the wrong side of the safety barrier, the OSHA-required impassable walls designed to keep non-maintenance personnel from blundering into the wrong corner.

Only one way forward. He eyed the sluggish murk. _Ick._ It was shallow enough to stand in for the most part, but an unexpected dropoff left him thrashing and gagging. He followed the channel until a service ladder let him out and found a health box helpfully bolted to the wall. Apparently OSHA standards were good for something after all.

He hesitated to plug in. The system would purge any infection, but what if it was spiked? He doubted it would be, locked away in this far back corner. It was an older model from the ones in the main lab, and had a thick coat of dust on top. His suit wasn’t giving him health warnings yet, but the burn in his side was still tender and now soaked with contaminated fluids.

_Better drugged than dead,_ he reasoned, and plugged in. The euphoria didn’t come; clearly the opiate was an aftermarket addition. He sighed in relief and let the box do its work, imagining he could feel the antibiotics purge the still-healing flesh. The box chimed complete, still mostly full, and he unplugged from it. Hopefully he would find a hazmat suit repair station nearby too, and could patch the hole.

The catwalk led him to an unlocked door. The door led him into a maze of steel plate walls, an accidental space between necessary infrastructure co-opted to provide maintenance access. After many wrong turns in the maze, he found a catwalk over the cargo delivery system. Crates hung frozen, victims of some power shutoff somewhere else, over a cement-floored void.

Only one way forward.

_I’m a physicist. I can do this,_ he thought, and looked down. Each cate was suspended by a magnetic clamp and cable. They were helpfully staggered, with not too much space between. But suit or no suit, if he missed a leap or hold he was dead.

_Application of force and trajectory. I can do this._ His heart pounded in his ears and his suit chimed a blood pressure warning. He hissed at it to shut up, thanks, and leapt for the first crate. He clung to the cable as the crate swayed under him, the magnetic clamp making terrible groaning noises. If it gave, he would fall with it.

Finally the crate steadied and he readied himself for the next jump. Seven crates. Six chasms of infinite air. Six moments of sheer terror. He’d slaughtered aliens without so much as a hitch in his breath, but this- this was panic. This was the physical, visceral paralyzing fear of death that so destroyed the brilliant minds he’d seen cowering in corners.

He understood now, and he pitied them. And he made himself jump.

His palms were wet with sweat. The crowbar slid through his fingers as he sank to his knees on solid ground. He’d made it across, somehow, impossibly, and was still alive. His suit informed him his heart rate was steadying, his blood pressure returning to normal. It also informed him he was dehydrated and should drink water soon.

He’d had… what, a cup and a half of coffee and a breakfast bar this morning, a few hours ago? His mind flashed back to the break room, sitting with his elbows on the table, perusing the duty roster while sipping the bitter cheap black lab coffee. A multi-billion dollar physics laboratory employing the world’s top minds and they still fed them like grad students.

If- _when-_ he made it to the surface, he’d demand better treatment from his next job. Who knew what that would be. Worm-hole physicist? Alien hunter? If nothing else the military ought to have a spare corner somewhere for someone who could summit Black Mesa during an alien invasion.

Speaking of which…. he wouldn’t be surprised if he met them half-way. The military had a base in the vicinity, the arid, desolate landscape and distance from civilization a benefit to their activities just as it was to Black Mesa’s. Surely someone had gotten word out to the base. If anyone knew about this by now, it would be them.

He turned a corner and there it was, an elevator with an _up_ arrow. He almost kissed the doors in relief. The elevator was still working. It went up. It went up and up and up and he almost shouted for joy. Finally something was going right.

Then the doors opened, and the body dropped from the broken ceiling tiles with a heavy, wet sound.

Lights flickered across the incongruously bold black and white floor, like something from a derelict elementary school. Live wires hissed and sparked, and blood, drying fast, told a violent story. Parasites skittered in the shadows and something moaned above the drop ceiling.

He retreated into the ducts again, preferring their dim and dusty interior to the chaos outside. In there, at least, darkness was _normal,_ and not a symptom of the deteriorating laboratories.

The duct got him into a storage room, where he watched through the grate as a scientist was hoisted upward by a barnacle and devoured head-first. He passed under the barnacle while it was busy, reasoning there wasn’t much he could do for the lower half of the person it dropped behind him. _It’s not my job to save them,_ he reminded himself. _It’s my job to live._

One man was still alive. Remmington, his old department head from Orientation, the catch-all category for Black Mesa fresh recruits. Of anyone who might outlast the invasion on sheer crusty will alone, it was this man. Had he survived the parasites by poisoning them with his own dry stream of useless, outdated physics trivia? Probably.

“Gordon!” he exclaimed, too loudly. Freeman motioned for him to be silent, but it was too late. The ceiling collapsed in as another barnacle dropped its poisonous red tendril. He stepped carefully around it as Remmington pattered on. He caught “must have survived,” and “calling for help,” but when he turned to Remmington to motion for him to follow, the man was already hunched under a table. “You go on without me, I’ll wait here for rescue. Freeman, you’ll make it up, I’m sure. Just don’t forget about me!”

And so he turned away, and left the man to die. What could he do? Of all the souls in the mountain, this one was not his favorite, but Remmington had been the first name and face he knew in the mountain, the man who’d delivered the infamous newbie speech and hazed them all with a false containment breach, and had hand-picked the “survivors” to be hired from the pool of panicked applicants. Freeman remembered the drill well, had known it wasn’t a real breach, just as he’d known this one was.

Remmington had told him once, in a moment of infuriating patronization, “Physics isn’t desire, Gordon. Physics is action! You cannot sit and stare at your experiment and _desire_ it to be, you must act upon it. You must be the first motion of physics upon your world, if you want to receive anything from it.”

The words had been nearly nonsensical at the time, as he’d been buried in designing an experimental framework for assessing crystal resonance, his first step towards working with the metamaterials responsible for the breach, but they came back now.

He did not merely wish to survive, like the cowering scientists and ineffective security guards. No, he went out to make his survival a reality by being the operator of his reality. The crowbar pivoted in his hand as he brought it down through a leaping parasite. The hall lights flickered and revealed another, and he smashed it under his boot.

The storerooms and breakroom provided water. The crowbar did not give him access to the vending machines, and his wallet was locked up safely in his locker a very long way behind him. So he raided the cabinets and found a bag of stale chips. Better than nothing, he supposed. The salts and carbohydrates tasted good after the strain and forced healing.

Behind another storage room he found a security office with ammunition and, hallelujah, a shotgun. The security guard locked in his little cubicle helpfully informed him the only way out was the way he’d come, then refused him entry on the grounds he might be infected and not know it yet.

The man had apparently been spared the worst of the invasion and had no intention of exposing himself to it.

Freeman couldn’t blame him. He’d have done the same, in the man’s shoes. _Survive_ , he thought, and silently wished the man well. Maybe they’d find a living guard down here, bunkered and safe. Or maybe a dried husk, dead of dehydration and choosing that way out over the unknown horrors beyond.

He reentered the ducts and crawled onwards. This one was not empty, and twice the parasites’ claws dug through his suit and pierced his flesh before he could wrench them off in the enclosed space. _Blood loss,_ the suit told him, as if the slick trail he left behind wasn’t evidence enough.

On the far side of the ducts, a man ran towards him screaming for help and was shot dead.

For a split second he wondered if the aliens had figured out human weaponry, but no. The faint background whirring told him this was an intruder drone, a barbaric safeguard in the high-security storage vaults. Enormous quantities of precious metals and nuclear materials were used in Black Mesa’s research and, as a deterrent against theft and sabotage, a brutal system of automated defenses guarded the vaults. The intruder drone hummed and chimed a one-heartbeat warning before sending a splatter of lead his direction. The suit deflected the first three impacts and by then he was behind a crate, moderately safe. The drone shot lightweight projectiles, certainly deadly against an unarmored trespasser but less effective against his suit. That said, the suit was informing him of new punctures and a sharp pain in his calf meant at least one had penetrated. From then it became an arithmetic of how many hits he could take, and where, before the machine did irreparable damage.

He made it to the shutoff box with only minor wounds; minor being “survivable” by the suit’s classification, and by the presence of an aid box behind the dormant drone.

This one was spiked. Flesh grew over the bullet buried in his leg and over the lacerations caused by the parasite attacks, as painfully as experiencing the wound all over again, and as pleasurably as- as- his comparisons failed him.

Freeman was not a man of physical pleasures. He did not drink, he did not pursue recreational drugs. He did not have intimate relationships. His body didn’t crave chemical stimulation beyond his morning coffee. He had no context for what the synthetic stimulants were doing to him, but he knew it wasn’t good for his long-term health.

_I live at cost, on borrowed time,_ he thought, and unplugged from the box. The suit told him he was in good health, but his eyes wouldn’t focus. He swung wildly at a chittering blur and on the second swipe crushed the parasite.

If he wasn’t careful, the medical treatment itself might kill him before the blood loss and trauma would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The med boxes are spiked in reference to the way I played the game, in one mad rush from one to the next because I am Not Great at Not Taking Damage. Wanted a way in narrative to simulate the relief of a first aid station when you're down to five health points. Also I am using this dude's walkthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vFZ7PZ0bwc as a reference for this, so the story is linear instead of just my wandering, backtracking, much-getting-lost-and-dying game experience.


	5. Chapter 5

He steadied himself on the wall and stood. The high-security vault would have the perquisite high-security supplies office, with useful things like ammunition and yes, grenades. He was very pleased with this development, though he realized he wasn’t familiar with the explosive range of the grenade. A gun’s physical application of force and destruction was easier to control; a grenade would wound or kill him as easily as any other organism.

A staircase led up. Normal people, people not crawling through vents and ceilings, accessed the vault through a series of double-locked doors where identity was verified and paperwork checked. Around the corner of the stairs a living security guard hailed him. “You alive too, friend? Let me come with you, I’ll watch your back.” The man shot two parasites off the stairs and nodded to him. “I remember you, I used to work the tram station. Freeman, right? You know how to use that thing?” he asked, eying the shotgun.

Freeman answered both questions with one sharp nod and headed up the stairs. The guard was familiar, vaguely, and the man’s friendliness disconcerted him. Another scientist barricaded in the security office shouted encouragement but declined the guard’s invitation to come.

Then the guard shouted and charged past Freeman, into a conference room. He dove over the table, sending papers flying, and grasped for a pair of white-trousered legs just as they vanished into the vent.

Screams echoed down the vent and the man’s shin bones, with feet and leather shoes still attached, fell back out. The guard dropped them and vomited.

Freeman left him behind.

The dry labs and conference space off the vault were designed for board member visits and government oversight. The organic contours made the space feel less sterile and utilitarian, but tricked the eye into ignoring blind spots and shadowed places.

Freeman spun at the dry crackle of a rift. Bright yellow lightning danced over the checkerboard floor and two bipedal aliens materialized, hissing venomously at him. He caught one through the head with the shotgun but the other lashed his legs with electricity. He went down on his knees at the sudden numbness and shot up into its gut as it prepared a second blast.

Three more searing balls of lightning, three more elongated bipedal shadows emerged around the corner. He cocked the shogun and-

From over his shoulder, shots rang out. His right ear howled in pain.

“Got one!” the guard hollered.

Freeman shot the other two bipeds and stood, stiffly, shaking the numbness from his knees. The suit told him he was not significantly injured. He limped to around the corner and into the little green-carpeted office at the end. It had once been a chemical storage closet, before someone’s expansion and someone else’s budget cut had converted it into the joke of a workspace it was now. But it had the world’s ugliest plaid couch, a tiny desk, a recycled banker’s light and a drawer full of pistol ammunition.

And the chair behind the desk was empty.

Freeman clutched the back of the folding chair, knowing if he sat down he might not get up again. Thornton, the only man in the entire mountain he’d truly trust at his back with a gun, wasn’t here. The man was as eccentric as any physicist and he loved firearms. He had a concealed carry permit and always brought a pistol to work. And because he was Thornton, it was a special silver-plated engraved fancy limited-edition gun with the date of his doctoral dissertation defense stamped on the butt.

He’d known Thornton probably wasn’t in the mountain, but he’d hoped. Silently, without letting himself know he’d hoped. And he knew it now by the crushing sense of aloneness he felt at the sight of that cheap empty chair and sagging plaid couch. It was Tuesday, and Thornton never came to work on Tuesdays.

So instead he got stuck with the joke of a security guard, who was at that very moment carving a notch into his sidearm with a pocket knife. _Liabilities._

But the guard did know how to fire a gun, and together they made their way through the green-carpeted offices and whiteboard-walled workstations. The guard even bought him a soda at the vending machine, while Freeman shot the biped that teleported in beside them.

“So the guys say you don’t talk because you think everyone’s inferior to you,” the guard stated, as they caught their breath in the hall after clearing it of parasites.

Freeman lowered his brows and glared, first at the half-drunk soda, then at the guard. And didn’t answer.

“You really can’t talk?”

Freeman drank the last of the soda and crushed the can in his gloved hand. He dropped it and pushed through the double doors, out of the visible-to-dignitaries sections and into the bare-walled caverns of the mountain’s productive space. He was tempted to let the guard charge through first and be grabbed by the barnacle’s tentacle, but at the last minute he blocked the guard and shot the thing off the ceiling. Who knew how many humans still lived in the mountain? He wouldn’t waste this one, even if it was proving to be an annoyance.

On the landing, the double-beep of a security drone warned him seconds before bullets cut across his path. He dove and rolled to the wall, slid under the drone, and shot it.

“I’m hit!” the security guard yelled. Blood blossomed dark on his blue uniform, just above his knee. Freeman shook his head. He’d forgotten how tender bare human flesh was. He marched the guard back down the stairs and fairly shoved him into the aid station on the landing.

The guard moaned and his eyes rolled back. He collapsed into a shivering heap on the floor beside the trash can, making incoherent noises of pleasure. Freeman ripped the man’s pants and checked the wound; pink scar tissue formed over it in seconds, making an angry, tender knot over the bullet wound. The guard wouldn’t bleed out, but he wouldn’t be good for much either.

Freeman wondered if he looked as ridiculous caught in the throes of the aid station as this man did, and fervently hoped he didn’t. Alien invasion aside, he did still have some dignity. And a reputation for insufferable arrogance.

He went back up, past the drone, bypassed the vault entrance it was guarding, and shot a parasite off a dead man’s head. The body collapsed like a stringless marionette. Something skittered behind him and he looked back to see two more parasites fall from the ceiling. He crushed them with the crowbar, conscious of his limited ammunition, and told himself he bothered because he didn’t want them to catch the drugged guard before the man could defend himself.

The next door past the vault opened into a maintenance tunnel, all exposed ductwork and utilitarian cement. The bipeds showed up with bold color against the grey backdrop. Down into the maintenance cargo bay he went, reasoning that any section built to receive regular shipments must have easy access to the surface.

But the bipeds just kept materializing. He shot two, launched a grenade at a third, and sprawled behind a crate to shield himself from the explosion. The crate shattered on impact, sending fragments of plastic packing material spiraling into the air. Behind the cloud, two more bipeds crackled into reality. Up came the shotgun but it clicked with impotence.

He dropped it and drew the handgun in his right hand, the crowbar in his left. He shot the first biped through its ruby-red eye while the second raked his side with electricity. He spun and caught its torso, just under the three arms, with the hooked end of the crowbar and threw it over, then shot into its center of mass three times.

It stopped twitching. He hissed a relieved sigh, suddenly very tired.

The cargo bay doors wouldn’t open. They were broken or jammed or needed some form of authorization he didn’t have- he didn’t know, but the room was a dead end.

He skirted the five alien bodies and retraced his steps out of the maintenance area and into a wood-paneled hallway he’d only seen in passing. All its doors were locked and reinforced, electronic safeguards automatically triggered by the disaster on the lower floors. Proprietary technology, precious research, irreplaceable samples… whatever the company didn’t want to risk discovered or liberated by law-makers or rivals, it was blocking his exit. And so back in he went, surveying the room. There had to be an exit. There _would_ be an exit, or he’d make one with the rest of his grenades.

Yes, there it was. A vent opening. He crawled in and was admitted to the inner sanctum of the HVAC system, where a giant fan whirred overhead and a tarnished ladder led promisingly upwards.

The fan was enormous, each blade as tall as he was. It wasn’t moving fast, but it was moving with purpose, and with enough torque, he guessed, to sever a limb, suit or no suit.

He walked back off its catwalk and considered. Then he turned around. Beyond the fan lay another shaft, his only path left. But to get there…

He counted his breathing, in and out. Then he counted the fan blades, and the space between them. One- two- three- one- two- _now!_

And he jumped.

Air whirred behind him as the blade sliced past. He landed hard on his palms and knees on the far side, untouched but panting hard. He shook sweat from his hair and wiped his glasses.

The ducts let him bypass the security doors. He cleared the parasites as he went, earning deep lacerations in his left arm when one caught him by surprise, and fell hard through the ceiling when the duct collapsed under him. He landed with a crash on a desk and rolled off, clutching his shin.

_Minor fracture detected,_ the suit informed him and he swore. The suit was already pumping morphine into his system, dulling the pain of a broken tibia,

There was a med box on the wall above the desk.

A med box in a strangely isolated, opulent little office.

He eyed it with growing suspicion.

Whose office was this? No name on the desk or door, no papers, nothing identifying. But someone important, someone who could afford a very personal touch to their very isolated workspace.

He wondered if the thing would even heal him, or if it’d leave him in a drugged, slobbering heap, gift-wrapped for the next parasite.

But his leg wouldn’t hold his weight and even through the morphine trying it left him gasping for breath. He was not going to survive the mountain by hopping on one leg, and who knew where the next med box was? He plugged in, and yes, clearly, this was the office of whatever perverted soul had designed the infernal things. That was his last coherent thought for about twenty minutes.

On the plus side, the dark little office seemed forgotten by the rest of the mountain and by its new tenants, and thus his unscientific, undignified reaction to the chemical payload went unnoticed. On the minus side, this was his third hit in a few hours and while his leg now held him up with a minimum of pain, his hand lingered on the empty med box, his body drawn to its proximity by the start of a conditioned response.

He searched the filing cabinet, just to be thorough, and to make himself do something not related to aid station drugs, and found a shocking volume of ammunition and two more hand guns.

Now he really wanted to know whose office this was.

Outside the office, he was past the high-security doors. Ahead, the VIP breakroom sat in a section of lowered floor, surrounded by walkways and tables. The chairs, he noted, looked considerably more comfortable than the cheap plastic folding ones in the resonance laboratory’s breakroom. Wood-panneled halls and tasteful beige floors –no checkerboard and garish green here- led him to a coffee alcove. A collection of scientists had tried to barricade themselves inside, but half were parasitized, and the other half had been messily dissected by their former comrades.

One parasite-headed figure saw him and turned, clawed hands outstretched, chittering a warning. He blew its head in, then bludgeoned the other to death with the crowbar.

He had the door unlocked and half open when he stopped and looked back.

That was an automatic espresso machine in the alcove, splattered with human and alien blood though it was. He wiped gore off the buttons and hit the sequence for a cup of coffee with extra sugar and extra shots. He downed it, enjoying the sweet-acid taste, and glad of the jolt of sugar and caffeine. The med box’s synthetic cobwebs were beginning to clear from his mind.

Then his shoe stuck on the curve of an opened ribcage and he nearly lost the coffee. _No-_ he told himself, hands on the counter, fighting to keep his breath even- _It’s not my job to save them. It’s my job to live. And a cup of coffee in this nightmare is not an inhuman indulgence._ But for a fraction of a second he’d closed his eyes and smelled only coffee, not blood, and tasted only sugar, not fear. For that second, he’d been sitting at his usual table, waiting to clock in.

And now it all started over.

He swore silently, cursing the aid boxes, the espresso machine, the aliens and the very nature of the universe to allow such a thing.

And he wiped his nose, stepped over the body and slammed open the door, crowbar ready.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Short chapter tonight.

Cold storage. Of course.  
  
Freeman hated cold storage. The place was built like a medieval fortress, byproduct of being hurriedly added on to in Black Mesa’s period of rampant pharmaceutical research and development, then abandoned in the years following their shift to nuclear, metamaterial and crystal resonance research.  
  
Old biological samples, temperature-sensitive metamaterials, forgotten projects and unclean petri dishes, and the odd crate of cafeteria hot-pockets dotted the frost-encased shelves. The floor was slick with a layer of microscopic ice crystals. His breath fogged in the air and on his glasses.  
  
He wondered what the temperature change did to his gun. The crowbar was more obvious, the metal becoming colder by the second. He felt it through the suit glove, and he felt the cold creep in through damaged cracks and latex joints.  
But the only way forward was through. He tried to remember the layout for the cold storage warrens and plunged in, trying not to breathe too deeply. A man screamed and charged past him. He spread his feet wide to keep from slipping on the floor. The man was not so lucky; he went down and caught his forehead on a shelf. Yellow goo splattered over the man’s white-coated back, produced by –  
  
Freeman shot the organism before he registered it as a new alien species, a two-legged acid-spitting blob. He stepped over its body, moving quickly around the partition, shotgun ready. It was alone in its lair, but it had dragged several more bodies into the alcove behind protruding refrigeration ducts. He retrieved ammunition from the stiff frozen body of a security guard and moved on.  
  
Was the acid spitter naturally immune to the cold? Was it intelligent enough to store the bodies for future consumption?  
  
_I am not a biologist!_ He reminded himself, and gripped the shotgun more tightly. If he started to wonder too much, he might hesitate. Information was seductive like that.  
  
He knew cold storage had multiple access points, reflective of both Black Mesa’s intellectual separation policy and budget cuts. One centrally located freezer was cheaper than multiple lab-specific units; just give everyone their own access point and sample coding, and make the place so cold no one would stand around and discuss work inside. So he knew the icy maze had an exit. Somewhere.  
  
A crate exploded beside him and he hit the ground, shotgun up and firing. Another acid spitter fell limp in the splinters, its yellow payload bubbling out across the floor.  
  
He swore as he got up, silently and colorfully. The spitters were smart.  
  
In the next chamber, huge slabs of lab-grown meat hung from ceiling hooks. Not even the aliens were eating them, which said something about Black Mesa’s foray into culinary chemistry. He explored further, tempted to put his left hand on the wall and defeat the maze by process of exhaustion. Where were the other doors?  
  
Yes, there was one.  
  
Its lever was cased with ice. He wasted precious minutes chipping it off, every breath painfully cold, and found the door locked securely from the other side. The lever wouldn’t even budge.  
  
He whacked it with the crowbar as hard as he could, and regretted it as the sound rang through the steel-plated walls.  
  
“Are you there?” someone whispered.  
  
A stack of ancient produce boxes, their contents long since destroyed by frost, moved a fraction of an inch. He trained his shotgun on it, just in case the spitters had learned how to talk.  
  
But just one thin, white-skinned hand, fingertips blue with cold, emerged. “If you’re human, please help me!” the scientist cried. “I can’t take this any longer. I’m going to die in here!”  
  
Freeman scooted the boxes away with his foot. The man crawled out from under the shelf. He was old, but the cold aged him further. His body shivered uncontrollably and his teeth chattered. “I thought I’d escape them here. No idea they liked the cold…” he shoved his fingers in his armpits and hugged himself, rocking back and forth. “So cold. I’ve been hiding for hours. Has help come yet?”  
  
Freeman shrugged, and wondered what on earth he was going to do next. The sense of fellow humanity with this lone begging scientist was growing, but he tamped it down. Survival with this man in tow would be impossible. He looked up and around, searching for inspiration, and saw the vent.  
  
He pointed to it.  
  
The man saw, nodded, and lowered himself back down in defeat. He sat crouched on the cold floor, rocking back and forth. “I’d never make it up there. I can’t even feel my hands. You’d better go on without me. I’ll just stay here. At least I can sleep soon, and then it’ll be over.”  
  
He hoped the man was right. Death by hypothermia seemed tame compared to death by acid, or dismemberment, or parasite, or electrocution…  
  
The vent was not clean.  
  
Blood splatter told him he wasn’t the first human to attempt it. Parasites hunkered in the shadows and clawed at his elbows. He beat them off and was relieved to find emergency power packs for the suit on a dead security guard. The guard had tried to escape the vent and been cornered, and had taken his own life before parasites had gotten to him. Freeman admired his bravery for as long as it took to empty his utility belt of anything useful, then moved on.  
  
The power packs gave the suit’s internal system enough of a boost to start repairing itself. Its nanotechnology was effective and functional; miles ahead of civilian and military tech, but still energy-hungry and slow. The suit rippled organically around him. He paused in the dark confines of the vent and resisted the urge to rip it off. The back of his mind insisted the thing had become alien, biological, dangerous.  
  
No. He gripped the crowbar in both hands and hissed as the suit’s repair function slid over the burned flesh on his side. The speed-healed scar tissue was only a thin outer layer over the underlying trauma. The suit did as it was programmed, knitting lose plates back together and reconnecting damaged joints, without any care for the thing it protected. He winced when it repaired holes left by the parasites, and as it extracted bits of itself from the scar tissue, he had his answer- yes, the speed healed flesh was growing around the shrapnel.  
  
Now he had a new choice. Repair the suit, at the cost of reopening old wounds.  
  
_Blood loss detected_ , it informed him.  
  
No kidding, he thought, feeling warm liquid seep into the suit lining yet again.  
  
The vents dropped him into the refrigeration system’s maintenance access room, where a very old, dusty human skull grinned disconcertingly back at him from the top of the ductwork.  
  
How long had _that_ been there?! It certainly predated the barnacles infesting the place.  
  
And then he was back on the civilized side of the wall, in a brightly lit corridor with only one dead body and a scattering of aliens. He had a disconcerting moment of déjà vu – were the corridors starting to look familiar, or had he been here before?- if he’d made one giant loop in the HVAC system he’d-  
  
No. He took a slow, long breath and watched a surprisingly competent security officer, crouched over the body of his dead comrade, kill a puppetted scientist before it eviscerated another man. The man stood, careful not to disturb the dead body.  
  
Freeman was struck with the dueling thoughts of respect for the man’s levelheadedness and skill, and disappointment that he wouldn’t get to strip the body’s service belt of ammo. Because the security guard wasn’t going to leave his dead friend’s side.  
“Head for the surface and tell them we’re down here,” he said.  
  
Freeman nodded.  
  
For the first time in decades he regretted his silence. He couldn’t explain to the guard that there was a scientist slowly freezing to death in cold storage. There wasn’t any point, he reasoned. The guard was poorly equipped to handle a duct crawling with parasites or a cold-room with ambushing acid spitters and the man under the shelf hadn’t been in any shape to climb and yet-  
  
-he looked back at the guard, into his bloodshot grey eyes and tear-stained face, and hoped they’d both get out alive.  
  
He nodded once, sharply, and headed up the stairs.  
  
And hit the far wall hard, his body reacting to movement in his peripheral vision. The cement block wall ahead cracked, buckled and crumbled, and through the wreckage stepped a parasite-headed human body.  
  
It had battered its way through an eight inch thick cement block _wall._  
  
He shot the parasite off, caught movement, turned and fired into a second one. The third he pulled up and shot wide at the last moment, catching a glimpse of upraised, unbloodied palms. “Don’t shoot!” the terrified researcher pleaded.  
  
He hauled the man up and shoved him back towards the stairs, hoping he’d catch the hint and join the other survivors.  
The corridor ended in an elevator shaft.  
  
A shaft with no elevator.  
  
A shaft vanishing into the dark dozens of stories below.  
  
With a ladder on the far wall, painted a nice bright helpful safety yellow.  
  
He gritted his teeth, wedged the crowbar through the shotgun strap and double-checked his sidearm holster. He paced back from the door, counting his steps. He’d long-jumped once, in college, because he could. He’d landed on his shoulder and dislocated it.  
  
If he fell, he’d die.  
  
He imagined the dusty turf of the track field extending across the darkness. Only one way forward. Only one way up. His palms itched and his fingers twitched, imagining impact with the ladder. He'd have only a breath to grab it and hold on. The impact would fling him against the far wall. He might lose weapons. He checked the crowbar again and knew he was stalling.  
  
It would be just like Black Mesa, to be more deadly than the aliens infesting it. But he'd survived board meetings, budget cuts, crystal insertions and too many variables. He'd survived a tear in reality and he'd stood on an alien world. He could make one freaking jump.  
  
_Do your worst_ , he thought, and then wondered what the psych profile for talking to buildings was.  
  
He ran and jumped.  
  
Far above him, someone screamed.  
  
  



	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Freeman meets an elevator shaft, considers gravity, collects data about the suit, and discovers marines.

“I can’t hold on!” the man cried. And then he fell, white coat streaming around his flailing body.

Freeman watched him vanish down the shaft, all twenty-seven stories of unlit gravity. He clung to his yellow ladder and shuddered in sympathetic horror. He knew how long the fall would take. Calculating terminal velocity for the average human weight was a child’s exercise.

But today was not a day to be a physicist.

He uncurled one orange-gloved hand from the yellow rung and forced it up. One boot up after it. Next rung. He climbed by force of will, his guns and crowbar clanking off the painted steel. Then edged around the narrow banded safety strip, and climbed again. Four stories up, he saw the ladder hanging over empty space. He had no room to back up and run this time. And only one way forward.

Breath in. Breath out. Brace. Leap.

He caught the lowest rung and clung, its surface sticky with blood and sweat from the fallen man. His own body was dead weight over the black pit and his shoulders groaned with the effort of hauling himself up. One rung. Then the next. He curled his body up awkwardly, getting a toe in the lowest rung to provide leverage.

He rolled onto the elevator’s roof and sat panting against the cable box. His shoulders shook with strain and adrenaline. And fear.

Freeman was as afraid of dying as any human, and disinclined to die by alien parasitism, but the shuffling puppets, acid-spitters and bipeds didn’t make his heart pound and vision narrow the way the black space below him did. Maybe it was the biology thing again, maybe he’d fear the visceral death more if he understood it as well as he understood the simple act of _falling._

Because it wasn’t the splatter at the bottom that gave him nightmares, it was the stomach-chilling wait between the last moment of salvation and the first moment of eternity, when the mind realized death was inevitable but the body hadn’t yet met earth.

For a split second he was the falling scientist, grasping at open air.

 _No._ Today was not a day for empathy. On the surface, under open sun, then he’d have time to process and remember. Now he needed to move.

The elevator gave him access to the secondary nuclear storage facility, behind the upper laboratories. He smelled fresh air, surface air, coming through the triple-layered HVAC filtration system. It smelled amazing.

A scientist pounded on heavy safety glass, crying for the security officer to open the blast doors and let him out. But the security officer wasn’t obeying. He was standing upright because the puppet had one long-clawed hand around his throat and the other around his spine. With one sharp yank, the puppet separated flesh from bone and the officer collapsed with a heavy, wet sound. The puppet bent down to feed.

The scientist backed up, turned and ran, and exploded. Bits of human rained back down the corridor.

What new horror was this?

 _Oh._ He saw the black box, the pale blue light of the trigger laser, and understood. The military had arrived, and they hadn’t liked what they’d found.

He crept around the corner and into a maze of tripod-mounted drone guns, crates of extra laboratory supplies, and rippling yellow holes in reality. The guns came alive at his movement, but were distracted by the parasites falling from thin air.

Thankfully they were easy to disable once upset, and just a fraction of a second slow to change targets. Clearly the military didn’t want to take chances with anything living escaping the base. Did they know they still had scientists and safety personnel trapped on the lower levels? Did they care? They’d seeded the corridors with claymores and traps, easily visible and avoidable to a human eye. So maybe they did, and were hoping the average IQ of Black Mesa would be high enough to avoid the traps.

Maybe they just hadn’t counted on blind panic, he thought, as he passed another dead scientist, body riddled with holes from a drone gun.

He made his way through dusty, overstuffed storage rooms, the detritus of decades of forgotten, failed research experiments left to rot in peace. There were other entrances to the auxiliary storage, just like with cold storage; a place where multiple labs came together to dump their unwanted waste. He hoped nothing was particularly prone to explosions, as he dropped a grenade behind a stack of crates and listened for the telltale blat of dronefire.

Two tripods spawned in the corridor behind him and were blown to bits by the claymore he’d passed. So the things were doing their job after all.

But his grenade had ripped a hole in what seemed to be a drum of industrial lubricant, and when he set foot in it he went sailing across the room and into the barrel of a drone gun. It came awake with a chirp and he knocked its legs out more by accident than design, flailing for purchase on the slick floor, and watched helplessly as the second drone gun cut down two colleagues in the next room.

He swore in his head, in red ink, across the page, and flung both drone guns down the open freight shaft.

Beyond him, above the next maze of red and green trip lasers, a man in a suit watched his progress. He raised his handgun and sighted in on the man’s too-green, too-long face. But he didn’t shoot. The man stared unblinking, turned his back, and walked away.

Red ladders connected the storage space to a series of maintenance catwalks. He climbed up to where the man had been, but he was gone.

“Rescued at last!” a very human voice said in the next room.

“Stay back!” another human voice said.

Someone fired a gun, and someone screamed.

Freeman dropped off the catwalk and into the main access stairwell. He watched the scientist slump against the lift grate, red smearing the steel mesh behind him. And he watched the green-jacketed human lower his weapon and turn away from the body.

Human. Armed. Apparently male, in military fatigues. Freeman catalogued the details as he descended the stairs. He walked quietly, soundlessly, and kept to the man’s blind spot. Hostile? Or just scared?

Alone. Military didn’t function alone, they functioned in pairs or squads. Lost or lone survivor? He considered calling out to the man, as one human to another. But the scientist had done just that and was now dead.

Set aside aliens for a moment and Freeman was witness to a murder.

He gripped the shotgun and took another step.

Whether he made some small noise, or a shifting shadow gave him away, or the military had a sixth sense he never knew. The marine spun and raised his short, squat automatic rifle and fired.

Freeman felt the sharp, heavy weight of the bullet in his chest and fired back.

The marine was dead.

No, the _man_ was dead. The human being under the uniform was a young man with a gun and a set of impossible orders, dropped into insanity and told to kill. Freeman would never know if he’d mistaken the orange suit for something alien, or if he’d been specifically instructed to kill all living organisms in the base. Had he feared for his life, or had he trusted his weapons and superiors to protect him? Did he have a family and a home on the surface, or was he a loner and this his first stop on a career path of bloodshed and war?

 _Stop._ Freeman reined in his imagination, not sure if the sudden thought path was true human empathy and regret, or just a moment’s hyperfixation as relief from the slaughter. The man was dead. Freeman had killed him. The first human life.

Maybe the last. Hopefully the last.

The marine had shot first, and the bullet hole in Freeman’s chest ached with every breath. The suit had stabilized the damage and he was still upright and walking, but a center-of-mass chest shot was something he couldn’t ignore. He wanted a med box, a good spiked one, knowing the opiate would wash away the revulsion in his gut and put mental distance between the act of killing and the art of surviving.

 _He and I both had jobs to do, and I need to finish mine._ Survive. Kill, climb, hunt, hide. Survive.

But the wet flesh smell, the death odor of feces and stomach gasses, and the sulfur of gunsmoke followed him.

He found a med box under the stairs and plugged in, glad of the squirming feel of flesh closing over his chest, glad of the rush and fog of the drugs. The sensation was calming, grounding, familiar. The nausea receded, replaced by physical hunger and chemical exhaustion. Things he could deal with. Problems he could solve.

He stepped over the scientist’s body and into the elevator. Up was always the right direction.

The more frequently used freight storage bay was alive with humanity. Two marines shot as they came down the access stair and a screaming white-coated man clutched his thigh and crawled for cover behind the crates. Freeman shot back, intentionally aiming for the ground at their feet. They backed up the staircase and he ran for the injured man.

“They’re trying to kill us!” he panted, hands clasped over his leg. Red blood pulsed from the wound.

Freeman slid his right arm under the man’s back and kept his pistol out in his left, tracking the stairs as they circumvented the crates. He’d seen a med box- yes, right there. He set the scientist down and slammed the box’s cable into bare flesh just above the bullet wound. The scientist gasped and his eyes unfocused as the cocktail took effect. The bleeding slowed immediately but the man was immobile. He would be easy prey for any hostile.

A suit repair station nearby closed the bullet hole in Freeman’s chest plate. He winced as it put pressure on the tender skin of his chest and wondered exactly how effective the suit was against military weapons. It certainly hadn’t been designed to withstand gunfire. Why would it have been? But he’d survived a close-range shot to the chest.

The data suggested the suit would protect him.

The two marines returned, boots slamming hollowly on the cement stairs.

The healing scientist shuddered against the wall, fingers twitching, eyes closed. Freeman stayed between him and the approaching marines. He wanted to shout _I’m human!_ But no sound came. He wanted to put his hands up and drop to his knees, to let the men in green take control, to surrender and be a civilian again, but he couldn’t. Surrender was death. Acceptance was death. As long as he kept fighting, he stayed alive. And these men wanted a fight.

The first marine met his gaze, brown eyes locked wide on his, and raised his gun again.

Freeman staggered under the impact of two bullets, one in his hip and one in his thigh, and then he shot back. And he didn’t miss.

The marine had fired low, hesitated, shot to wound. He’d seen humanity and he’d second-guessed his orders.

Or maybe he’d shot quickly and wide, overcorrected for his weapon’s kick, or simply not had the time to adjust for the change in distance.

Either way he was dead.

A bullet whizzed past Freeman’s head, ruffling his hair. He dove for the floor and twisted to return fire. The second marine slumped lifeless on the staircase above. He stood, and realized he’d slid into the mingled blood of both the first marine and the scientist. The suit was slick with it, and he smelled the warm metallic tang.

Odd, he’d never considered the scent of blood before. But then it was a very biologist-oriented thing, not really in his wheelhouse. He limped to the med box and plugged in, taking what the scientist had left. He let out a long breath as the drugs went to work on flesh and mind alike. Bullet contusions were repaired and the death-flash of the marine’s last moments faded back. The suit repair station sent ripples of power through the suit’s plates and nanobots. He shivered at the crawling sensation it sent down his spine and across the bullet wounds. With luck, few marines had penetrated Black Mesa down this far. With luck, the rest weren’t under a “kill everything” order.

But it really wasn’t shaping up to be that kind of day.


	8. Chapter 8

He moved by instinct, from cover to cover, working his way through the freight delivery system. Conveyer belts were made to save steps and labor in the newest sections of the warehouse, where mass volumes of laboratory disposables like plastic pipettes and rubber gloves were stored. He crouched and scrambled through them crab-like, working against the belts’ direction. It was exhausting, but let him circumvent the most fortified military installations.

They’d entrenched themselves remarkably fast. They had sand bags, heavy weapons, even cement barricades. The sheer volume of drone guns and explosives strewn throughout Black Mesa suggested a powerful, organized response. Planned for. They knew the facility. They’d come in prepared.

They’d known a breach was likely. They’d known more than the scientists.

So who had decided every Black Mesa scientist need to die? Who decided the military needed to know more than the people working in the mountain?

Freeman didn’t _like_ his coworkers, in general. He considered one a mild sort of friend, two more were passing acquaintances, and five had been his superiors. He had no one working directly under him, though a few post-docs and some researchers had passed through his lab in the last few years. But that didn’t mean he wanted the mountain’s citizens slaughtered by alien claws and human bullets.

Through the second conveyer belt, he dropped into a lofted staging area. A catwalk connected the staging area to platform on the far side of the room, an afterthought of architecture. On the far side, a bunker of green sandbags protected three men in green fatigues. One man shot wide and fast over Freeman’s head.

He crouched behind the corner of the catwalk and put his hand around. He knew they could see him, because they were shooting at his hand.

Freeman hated signing. He hated signing one-handed, he hated signing in Black Mesa. He reserved it for the very, very rare occasion when a colleague at a conference initiated a conversation in sign language. Then he’d sign, gritted restrained politeness first, until they’d established a point of mutual interest. Then there was an exchange of business cards for formal conversation, and an exchange of sarcastic symbols as commentary on the presenters.

But he signed, letter by letter, _don’t shoot_.

They kept shooting. He signed again. He waved, open-handed. He put both hands around the corner, empty, open, and they still kept shooting. He sighed. And signed again, the simple rude symbol anyone would recognize.

A bullet clipped his glove. He felt the tug and sting of broken skin. _Blood loss detected,_ the suit told him. He resisted the childish urge to put the cut in his mouth. The gloves were filthy and stained with alien fluids and who knew what else.

He shot the marine and moved on, methodically working from cover to cover through the freight sorting and staging docks. He watched a marine so intent on shooting a white-coated scientist cowering behind a crate that he didn’t see a barnacle’s deadly fishing line. The marine was hauled up, screaming, his gun on the floor uselessly far below.

Freeman had no military training. He didn’t like competitive games, combat simulators, loud noises, concussive force or camo-colored clothing. He knew how to use a gun because his undergrad apartment building had been in a bad part of town and he, at the time a skinny, silent teen three years too young to be out on his own, had decided he’d rather shoot than be shot, if put to it.

He’d never had occasion to use the stubby little purse gun, but he’d practiced with it. And with other guns at the range, with soft-spoken men who decided a silent, dark-eyed kid needed to know how to defend himself. Firearms were just applied physics, and tactical movement through an enclosed space just another kind of vectoring, with a little optics and some basic knowledge of the more aggressive subset of humanity.

_I am a physicist, not a soldier. I choose to live._

He reloaded the shotgun.

The benefit of military incursion was the sudden plethora of ammunition and explosives. The marines were clearly armed for war, with each bunker and enclave holding many times the supplies necessary for the three- and five-man groups he was encountering.

He fought through the final freight warehouse to the extra-wide, extra-slow elevator used for moving heavy laboratory equipment and shielded nuclear samples down into the base. Fresh, desert-warm air wafted down the shaft. The lift groaned and heaved its way up, and killed any hope he had of sneaking out through whatever perimeter was now established around Black Mesa.

He sighed, swore in red ink, and gripped the automatic he’d taken from a dead marine.

Four men and an angry black helicopter waited for him.

They were aggressive, quick to fire, sure the helicopter would keep him pinned while they finished him off. They never took cover, and they died quickly.

And he was outside. The desert evening smelled good after sterile, processed scents of cement and acetone, and the stink of human and alien death. But the helicopter was still up there, still angling for a shot between stacks of cargo, bales of munitions and high cement walls. It covered the only viable surface exit too well, so he circled back, counting shots and timing his runs until he reached a shaft back down.

The thought of descending again made his stomach clench. His hands were slick with sweat in the gloves and his breath tight and shallow. The shaft was dark, narrow, poorly lit, dropping into a shadowy, forgotten maintenance walk. Dust was thick on the ground, and an outdated med box gleamed dully from a rusted wall. He’d caught three glancing bullets, just tears in suit and skin, so he bypassed the box entirely. No point in subjecting himself to whatever decayed cocktail it held.

A hatch let him into a cooling tower’s main ventilation shaft, where far below a massive fan pulsed overused dry air up into the night sky. Catwalks ringed it, rust spotting their bright safety yellow, with side vents opening in and out.

He stepped into the catwalk and, out of the corner of his eye, saw something dark fall past him.

Only reflex saved him; he crashed back into the maintenance shaft, slamming the door down as explosions rolled through the cooling tower. The helicopter was dropping bombs.

The shaft stilled and he reopened the hatch. The copter was still up there, still watching. He was trapped between the loading dock and the cooling tower, no way forward or back.

And men were dropping on cables down the tower, ready for a hatch-by-hatch search for him.

He took a deep breath, then another. Every sweep of the fan blades below vibrated up through his boots. If he fell, the suit wouldn’t save him. If the men cornered him in a duct, the suit wouldn’t save him, not with no room to maneuver. And in open ground, the copter would kill him.

He threw himself into open space.

Marines shouted above and bullets traced his trajectory, spattering fragments of hot metal as they ricocheted in the tower. And then his heels hit the ledge and his body curled on impact with the unforgiving wall. He clawed for the crowbar, for the HVAC vent, and slid head-first into its dark confines.

No room to maneuver, but with luck he was far enough ahead they wouldn’t shoot him in rear as he crawled for safety. And with luck, the ducts weren’t infested. Ahead, another fan pulsed. Vibrations sang through the suit gloves into his palms, through the knee pads into his thighs. He expected a bullet with every breath, a sweep of fan blade in the dark, or the skittering claws of a parasite on his neck.

The duct opened into another shaft, this one an intake. The air seemed to haul him downwards, into the fan blades below. He could see the next opening, the only way forward, dark and yawning under the fan. And the only way to reach it was through the narrow gap between blade sweep and duct corner. A blessing of a round fan in a square shaft, the space was only a hair wider than he was. He pressed himself into the corner, his back to the wall, and slid down, first hip-level, then chest-level, then nose-level with the deadly blades. The thrum was overwhelming, drowning out all other sound. A whole platoon might have followed him through the shaft and he would have heard nothing.

And then he was through, in clear, rapid air. He dove for the darkness of the ductwork and prayed the shadows weren’t occupied. His standard-issue LED penlight integrated into the suit illuminated a pathetically small spot of galvanized steel.

The duct spat him out, via a channel slicked with blood and fatty tissue, into the security room at the inner edge of the freight delivery maze. He’d watched the security guard die, the man whose blood now coated his chest plate and elbows.

He leaned against the wall below the duct and fought to control his breath. He’d seen the surface, he’d made it to open sky, and he’d been forced back in and now he was right where he started, and a lot of men dead in between.

“You started this,” a man said.

He looked up; a colleague, white hair frizzed around comically thick glasses, a white lab coat draped over thin shoulders, clothing a noncommittal shade of mute pale blue. The man was a relic, a wise but tottering figurehead of a past era in science. Freeman recognized him; Dr. Aimsworth, the head of Archives, former head of the Resonance lab, and before that- rumored once intellectual power behind all their applied nuclear physics work. But he’d aged, and he hadn’t aged well against the progressions in popular scientific thought. His mind, still sharp, still perfect, was too valuable for Black Mesa to release, so they’d imprisoned him in the skeletons of his past lives and were waiting for him to die so he would take all his proprietary knowledge into their carefully controlled, predug grave.

“And if anyone can finish it, your team can.” Aimsworth’s voice was steady and solid despite the trembling in his blue-veined hands. He gave curt, calm directions for a path to Lambda, involving several decommissioned wings of Black Mesa. What dark secrets lay waiting there?

Freeman nodded to Aimsworth. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder, looked him in the eye, and then left.

_“You can trust us. You can trust all of us,”_ Aimsworth had said.

_I can’t save you,_ he’d wanted to say back. _You can’t trust me._


	9. Chapter 9

There was power in the decommissioned, cold-war-era tram system. Small favors, at least he didn’t have to walk the half-mile to the rocketry labs. He slaughtered a scattering of parasites and ran into a pack of acid-spitters in the radioactive overflow and storage containment chambers.

Because of course someone had thought it was a good idea to vent the experimental outwash from their nuclear rocket project into the old tram system. He wondered if the screamers congregating on the catwalks above the massive skeletal silo were drawn to the radiation.

He heard voices, controlled, living voices, beyond the containment door. The silo was manned.

Was. He opened the door in time to hear the last wet coughs of a man on the floor, in time to see a black-clawed green… thing slam through the three-inch-thick radiation-proof lead glass panel and stab the other man. The claw skittered over the plate steel floor, searching, stabbing into flesh again before withdrawing into the silo.

“Kill it… please kill it…” the dying man begged. He gasped, hiccupping blood, and slumped over.

Freeman took a deep breath, clutched his shotgun and ran through the control room. Ruined electronics sparked and spat and the stench of burning rubber insulation filled his senses.

For a split second he was back in the resonance chamber, dodging yellow lightning and watching the world tear open.

Then the black claw slammed into the floor behind him and he landed stomach-first in the access walk beyond.

“Shh, it’ll hear us,” a guard whispered. He cowered in a corner by a structural support, clinging to it with a white-knuckled grip. The man’s gun lay useless on the floor, discarded.

Freeman wanted to throttle him for being a quivering coward but understood the feeling to well himself. He’d have loved to cower in a corner a time or two today, but that was not an option. An object in motion will stay in motion, he told himself, unless it sits down to rest.

He was very afraid if he stopped now, he’d never get going again.

_I choose to live,_ he reminded himself.

The claws skittered and slid across the steel plate floor. As usual, his path lay beyond them, the only way out of the silo through the lower access hatch. He sprinted for the ladder and pulled the pin on a grenade. He didn’t have many- no way to carry more than four- but was glad the military had left them laying around.

The thing recoiled from the explosion, and he ran through the opening to the second ladder. Down, grenade, down, grenade-

And was sept up and back by the claw as it raked him from shoulder to hip. It shook him and he fell to the last level, landing with a crash of gun and polymer on charred cement.

_Blood loss detected,_ the suit told him, as nerves caught up and his brain registered the pain. It had sliced through the suit like so much tissue paper, opening a brutal ragged cut down his back but missing, miraculously, his spine. Rib cage intact, he thought, breathing slowly through the fog of physical overload. He allowed himself one more breath, then pulled the pin on his last grenade and tossed it, as well as he could from his prone position, across the shaft.

It blew hotly from far too close, but the three talons were distracted and that was enough. He crawled into the hatch and access walk beyond.

He _hurt._ He hurt in ways the bullets hadn’t, in ways the crawling lightning and sonic alien screams hadn’t begun to visit on him. Blood pooled inside his suit, his skin burned with every breath and he felt a deadly lethargy overtaking him as his body protested movement. He couldn’t lift his left arm well and his left leg responded only slowly. Weight on it hurt something in his lower back, where severed muscles no longer transferred physical motion.

The body was just applied physics too, in the end, under all the wet biology. Bone, tendon, muscle. Forces acting on a solid frame. Potential energy released to spring forward with every step. And that thing had cut into his system, destroyed years of carefully cultivated lean muscle and trained endurance. He wanted it dead, just a little more than he wanted to give up and die himself.

He raised the shotgun, a painful moment, and shot the eerily green radioactive puppet stalking across the walk towards him. The kick made him gasp.

Beyond the walk, he leaned on coolant lines and inched his way forward. Set off the rocket, kill the beast, get to lambda. Simple. Blood splattered on the steel behind him.

He needed a med box and a suit repair station, but the silo predated that technology by several decades. The only way was forward, the only survival in one foot in front of the other. And ladders, and contaminated water, and the stinking gore of parasite-controlled human corpses.

The ladder led down. So did the next one. The suit had run out of morphine and his blood pressure was dropping. The cut wasn’t deep but it was long and ragged, and he couldn’t reach it to keep it closed, couldn’t risk taking off the suit to bandage it himself.

And then in an alcove, helpfully full of explosives, he found a med box.

A shiny, new, deceptively innocent med box.

He knew what was in it when he plugged in and he didn’t care. He slammed the alcove door shut with his boot and sat on the munitions crate, shotgun cradled in his lap, and closed his eyes against the drug-induced vertigo.

He was floating. He was flying. He was a ball of living flesh wrapped around a dead skeleton, a vine on a trellis, a coiled spring of potential energy stretched until it kinked and fell limp. The vine that was Freeman crawled up his own spine, drawing together torn muscle and flesh. In and out it wove through pink skin and pale fat, into deep red muscle and silvery tendon. The blueprint was there to follow, encoded in overtaxed cells and thinning blood. He gasped for air as his heart pounded, fighting to circulate and push oxygen to where it was needed.

And it wasn’t enough, not enough to maintain both life and consciousness, and he knew the sounds of once-men padding beyond the door, the eerie howl and scream of an infested throat and the scrape of searching claws. Loss of consciousness was death. Loss of blood was death. Loss of movement and momentum, that too was death. He’d die in a heap, sitting on a box in a closet, drugged to his eyebrows, unable to fight back.

He reached over and unplugged the med box.

His body protested, a part of him crying for the warm fog that blocked and hazed the memories of crawlers and death and a part of him protesting the pain that flooded back, but he stood. He raised the shotgun, and he opened the door.

The puppet took both barrels through the skull, the human body crumpling at his feet while the parasite splattered into a million tiny pieces against the far wall.

He leaned against the closet door jam and focused on mastering his breath. Certain ways of movement, of breathing and walking and shooting, hurt less than others. His back was half-healed, still oozing and tender, and the wrong pull or twist threatened to reopen thin scar tissue and new muscle fibers. He’d need another box, somewhere safer, and food and water, to heal completely. And he needed to repair the suit. Cold air hit his back and he shivered at the unexpected sensation; he’d forgotten how much the suit dulled any sense of fine touch; it allowed only pain to penetrate.

He moved forward, and forward was down. Down ladders requiring painful weight on his shoulders, down through water grey with unknown particulate matter, through pipes that set off his suit’s Geiger counter, until he ran out of tunnel.

The ancient vent fan sat dormant and silent, deep in its shaft. Another relic of a different age in Black Mesa’s past, the fan had once cleared the lower silos, drawing contaminated air, smoke and fumes up and out and pushing them through inadequate filtration before venting them to atmosphere. The fan was enormous. He could have parked a car on the blades with room to spare.

Down under those black, rusted blades was a switch, still helpfully lit up. Powered. He looked up; the only way out was now the right direction, by the most horrible route. Actual wooden boards formed a crude lattice at the ductwork’s peak, not even painted safety yellow. Their existence probably predated any attempt at workplace safety laws, something Black Mesa had definitely not pioneered. Up there he saw the black square of an open duct, the only unblocked, un-welded-shut-and-forgotten path to take. And to get there….

He gritted his teeth and leaned on his gun, staring at the button. Then up at the fan blades, and then back at the button. Would it be enough? The blades would probably move enough air to lift a small airplane, but enough to put him in a reverse freefall, move up all the way to the ceiling in a controlled fashion? Or would he slip from the airstream and plunge down the side to be minced by the sweep?

Only one way forward. Only one way out.

He hit the button.

By the time he reached the ladder back up, the blades were too fast to pass. So he went back and turned it off, waiting for it to slow. Then on again. Then off. Then on. Each time, counting breaths until the blades passed too quickly.

He had it timed. He ran for the ladder, the skin of his back crawling with anticipation of those black blades slicing through suit, flesh and bone.

One lurch upwards, two- and he was above them. They swept by hypnotically fast, shoving decades-old stale air and dust up at him. He coughed and wiped his eyes, staggered under the wind, and fell- into the fan, and then away from it. Nausea gripped him as he spun helpless, one hand clamped to his glasses and the other to his belt of guns, and then his back hit the dry-rotted boards and he gasped. Black closed over his eyes, and the boards splintered and shattered. Fragments stung his face and lodged in the soft skin of his back, but he was through, and swimming through air for refuge.

The tiny duct howled with vibrating resonance. Wind tore at him, tugging at every protrusion of the suit. His own blood misted and splattered redly on the duct wall ahead of him, blown over his shoulder. He slid on the metal as the wind pushed him forwards.

The ducts narrowed into a crawlspace, dim and red in the glow of forgotten emergency lights. He slid on his stomach, his injured back brushing protruding corners of a later-generation HVAC system. The whole structure moaned in the wind. Parasites skittered through the steel jungle; he crushed two, and a third leapt ineffectually at him from the far side of a boarded up channel.

And then the wind died as it spread into wider halls, and he dropped down into the white-lit human side of the facility. A normal-size door, with normal-size halls… he’d never considered the psychological impact of being in a built environment so clearly not built for a human. Lighting of the correct wavelength and ceilings of correct height made his heart slow in relief. Breathing came easier, the suit’s warning chimes about blood pressure somehow too low and too high eased off. He’d never had a problem with small spaces before, but he guessed he was fast developing one.

The coolant control station contained three puppets. He shot off their parasites and stepped over the mangled bodies, wincing again at the stink. It was a smell he never wanted to smell again, but was somehow glad he couldn’t ignore. The moment he no longer noticed the smell of death was a moment he stopped being the Freeman-the-physicist.

**Author's Note:**

> Unlike Freeman I am not a physicist, so please don't take too much offense at my gleeful gratuitous misuse of physics and mathematics terminology. (I'm an ecologist, I prefer swamps as a rule).


End file.
